International Year of Forests - 2011

The United Nations General Assembly declared 2011 as the International Year of Forests to raise awareness on sustainable management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests. vifabio collects the most important internet sources together for you.

You will find more biological web resources in our Internet Guide - a catalogue of annotated and evaluated internet sites.

Ambitious homepage - with reference to recent research - about everything you need to know about Amphibia and frogs in particular. The topics of this site span from frog diversity in different countries up to the latest news about frogs as well as documented photo albums. [Editorial staff vifabio]

This German-language web site is the school and children’s page of Save the Rain Forest, a charitable, environmental organisation. It is an appeal to think about the protection of the rain forest in school and in free time, and offers various tips as well as general information about rain forest clearance. In addition, there are other offers suitable for children such as a rain forest quiz, online puzzles, and rain forest pod casts (audio) to download. ... [Editorial staff vifabio]

The Amazon Tree Diversity Network is an electronic network of 143 botanists, ecologists and taxonomists that share data and information on tree diversity in the pan-Amazon (Amazonia s.s. and the Guyana Shield). Our drive is to gain a better understanding of the processes that drive (patterns of) alfa- and beta-diversity in the region and, through this knowledge, contribute to better conservation strategies for the region. Currently we work with data from botanical 1-ha plots (and sometimes different sizes), forest inventories, and herbarium collections. In 2003 the work of ATDN resulted the first accurate and robust map of tree alpha-diversity of the Amazon. We unravelled relationships between climate and diversity. The combination of the above results and use of functional groups, successfully tried in some of our Guyana plots, and now also in the Amazon, can perhaps help us to predict the effect of global change in these important and beautiful forests. ... [Information of the supplier]

Tropical ecosystems are the biologically richest places on the planet, yet what we know about them comes from scientific studies so specialized that the results rarely make the local news. “Most ecological studies last fewer than five years at a single study site, with measurements focused on an area of only ten meters squared,” explains Sandy Andelman, Vice President of Conservation International for the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Network. “Ecology needs to scale up to address global climate change and other environmental threats.” Scaling up to global proportions is precisely what TEAM was created to do. This ambitious program is devoted to monitoring long-term trends in biodiversity, land cover change, climate and ecosystem services in tropical forests. Tropical forests received first billing because of their overwhelming significance to the global biosphere (e.g., their disproportionately large role in global carbon and energy cycles) and because of the extraordinary threats they face. About 50 percent of the species described on Earth, and an even larger proportion of species not yet described, occur in tropical forests. The idea behind TEAM is deceptively simple: to measure and compare plants, terrestrial mammals, ground-dwelling birds and climate using a standard methodology in a range of tropical forests, from relatively pristine places to those most affected by people. TEAM currently operates in sixteen tropical forest sites across Africa, Asia and Latin America supporting a network of scientists committed to standardized methods of data collection to quantify how plants and animals respond to pressures such as climate change and human encroachment. ... [Information of the supplier]

The aims of the project are related to the understanding of diversity and ecosystem function and their relationship to human impact in forests and agroforestry systems of the Mata Atlântica in Paraná State, Brazil. General goals in this ecosystem approach are: 1.)to monitor ecosystem functionality and services in terms of biomass deposition and decomposition, nutrient cycling and forest succession including botany and soil microbiology at a functional level (tree growth, microbial biomass and activity),2.)to assess the diversity of soil biota in different habitats, estimate the magnitude of species richness and species loss and changes in community structure caused by anthropogenic alteration of the environment, and 3.)to develop a classification system indicating the quality of secondary forests in the southern Mata Atlântica as habitat for autochthonous (soil invertebrate) species. The investigation is considered a case study for the whole biome. ... [Information of the supplier]

The Amazon Forest Inventory Network is an international network that has been established to understand the biomass and dynamics of Amazonian forests. Since 2000 we have established a systematic framework for long-term monitoring of this region, which holds more biodiversity, water, and vegetation carbon, than any other region of the planet. RAINFOR has worked step-by-step, including partners across the nations of Amazon, taking account of the potentially strong modulating role of environmental variables like soil nutrition, and the need to help develop a new generation of Amazon ecologists. RAINFOR is curently supported by the Andes and Amazon Initiative of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. ... [Information of the supplier]

Tropical forests harbour thousands of useful plants that are harvested and used in subsistence economies or traded in local, regional or international markets. The effect on the ecosystem is little known, and the forests resilience is badly understood. Palms are the most useful group of plants in tropical American forests and in this project we study the effect of extraction and trade of palms on forest in the western Amazon, the Andes and the Pacific lowlands. We determine the size of the resource by making palm community studies in the different forest formations and determine the number of species and individuals of all palm species. The genetic structure of useful palm species is studied to determine how much harvesting of the species contributes to genetic erosion of its populations, and whether extraction can be made without harm. We determine how much palms are used for subsistence purposes by carrying out quantitative, ethnobotanical research in different forest types and we also study trade patterns for palm products from local markets to markets that involve export to other countries and continents. Palm populations are managed in various ways from sustainable ones to destructive harvesting; we study different ways in which palms are managed and we will propose sustainable methods to local farmers, local governments, NGOs and other interested parties. Finally we study national level mechanism that governs extraction, trade and commercialization of palm products, to identify positive and negative policies in relation to resilience of ecosystems and use this to propose sustainable policies to the governments. ... [Information of the supplier]